Hotel of the Saints

Praise for Ursula Hegi and
Hotel of the Saints

“Ursula Hegi is a tumbledown, headlong sort of writer. Her words rush out… like children rolling down a hill, laughing. She unpeels her characters like artichokes.”

— Susan Salter Reynolds, Los
Angeles Times

“[Hegi's] talent for crafting a memorable short story seems confirmed…. Her gift for offbeat characters, humor, and authenticity turns up again in
Hotel of the Saints.”

—Amy Graves,
The Boston Globe

“Ursula Hegi's gifts can conjure up an entire universe of loneliness and yearning, of self-delusion and suffering, in the space of four pages…. [She] is a compelling storyteller with a capacious heart, irreverent wit, and a keenly observant eye. She finds meaning in the smallest wrinkles of everyday existence, never patronizing her characters or her readers. Her tiny canvases teem with life.”

—Whitney Gould,
The San Diego Union-Tribune

“These are little crystals of human interaction, some brittle and cool, others throbbing with light.”

— Karen Valby,
Entertainment Weekly

“Ursula Hegi… writes short stories as adeptly as she does novels. Like a Polaroid picture brimming with sharp detail in only minutes, Hegi's characters and settings achieve intimacy and credibility in a few pages…. Each [story] is engaging and heartfelt.”

—Nancy Jacobsen,
Rocky Mountain News

“Finely wrought fables with transcendent resolutions… a vivid imagination and luminous writing.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Charming, low-key stories… Hegi writes with a gentle wit and an obvious affection for her offbeat characters, but it is the gracefully imparted details—tiny bubbles on the skin seen in the underwater light of a swimming pool, or the sunny, dusty smell of a dog's fur—that make her stories come brilliantly to life.”

—Carrie Bissey,
Booklist

“[Hegi] writes convincingly about the mysteries of the heart… [T]here are stories here that deliver a solar plexus punch.”

— Beth Kephart,
Book Magazine

“Hegi is a literary photographer of the heart. [Her] voice … is strong, varied, and beautiful. Readers of Hegi's highly regarded novels won't be disappointed and one hopes another ten years won't slip by before she publishes another collection. Highly recommended.”

—Beth Andersen,
Library Journal

“Enchanting, stirring, and written with emotional intensity and grace…. Hegi is a first-class storyteller.”

—Larry Lawrence,
The Abilene (Texas) Reporter-News

Other Books by Ursula Hegi

The Vision of Emma Blau
Tearing the Silence
Salt Dancers
Stones from the River
Floating in My Mother's Palm
Unearned Pleasures and Other Stories
Intrusions

Scribner
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2001 by Ursula Hegi

Previously published in different format.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

First Scribner ebook edition May 2011

SCRIBNER and design are registered trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc. used under license by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work.

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Manufactured in the United States of America

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-1-4391-4365-0

Some of the stories in this collection appeared in the following periodicals:
Hotel of the Saints
, Story;
The End of All Sadness
, Triquarterly;
A Woman's Perfume
, originally published as
Collaborators
, Louisville Review;
Doves
, Praire Schooner;
Freitod
, Ms.;
A Town Like Ours
, Praire Schooner;
The Juggler
, Story;
For Their Own Survival
, Loiusville Review.
Stolen Chocolates
was a selection of the
Syndicated Fiction Project
.

As always, I have valued the insights and comments I've received while working on these stories. A special thank you to my agents, Gail Hochman and Marianne Merola; to my editor, Mark Gompertz; to Olivia Caulliez, Deb Harper, Sue Mullen, and David Weekes; and to my husband, Gordon Gagliano.

For my son Adam

Hotel of the Saints

The End of All Sadness

A Woman's Perfume

Stolen Chocolates

Doves

Freitod

Moonwalkers

A Town Like Ours

The Juggler

For Their Own Survival

Lower Crossing

Hotel of the Saints

Lenny's mother,
the starch queen, is baking for her brother's funeral: cinnamon cookies and blackberry pies, garlic bread and her own recipe of poppyseed strudel. Lenny loves watching his mother's freckled fists pummel the dough. Next to her, he feels anemic in his seminary clothes.

Across the kitchen, her two sisters are also baking to see their one brother, Leonard, off according to parish tradition — the bake-off of the starch sisters.

Early on, Lenny learned to dodge his Uncle Leonard, who was far too fussy and pious for him, who took it upon himself to fill the father role in Lenny's life, who gave him his name at birth, holy cards from his hotel gift shop on Easter Sundays, and a pocket watch when Lenny entered the Jesuit seminary four years ago.

“In a family of women,” Uncle Leonard liked to say, “it's important for a boy to look up to a man.”

But by the time Lenny was eleven, he was already half a head taller than his uncle and felt far more comfortable with the women in the family. The starch queen—after an impulsive marriage in her late thirties—had divorced Lenny's father, Otis,
two months before Lenny was born, eager to return to her sisters, who'd never married, and continue the pattern of their childhood. The Taluccio sisters always were close: when they were girls, they insisted on sharing the turret room on the third floor of their old Victorian by the Willamette River in Portland. Now each sister has a cluster of rooms she calls her own, but they convene in the tiled kitchen and on the wide porch that envelops three sides of the house.

Slender, strong women with firm arms, the Taluccio sisters laugh too loudly and slap men's backs when they greet them. They seldom speak of Otis, who moved away from Portland after the divorce and has never contacted the starch queen or his child. When Lenny was a boy, they sometimes saw the yearning for his father in his eyes, and they answered whatever questions he had about Otis—how Otis hated the rain; how Otis liked raspberries mixed in with sliced bananas; how Otis had a cat named Muffy when he was a boy; how Otis liked to drive with the windows open—and they helped Lenny imagine Otis in some dry, warm climate, working in a marina, or a car dealership. Amongst themselves, though, the starch sisters are sure Otis just continued to drift from one unemployment line to another, braking for spells of work just long enough to qualify him, once again, for unemployment checks.

Now that they're retired from their jobs at the post office and fabric shop and hardware store, the starch sisters like to play cards late into the night—just the three of them—sitting around the kitchen table with a bowl of pretzels and a bottle of Chianti. They pray with the same passion that they bring to their food and their card games, and they take pride in still belonging to the parish where they were christened, a parish so
poor that the altar society has only one change of clothing for the Infant of Prague statue.

With their sister-in-law, Jocelyn, the starch sisters are patient, although she horrifies them with her helplessness. Forty years earlier, on her honeymoon, Lenny's Aunt Jocelyn gave up on getting her driver's license because she backed Uncle Leonard's car into a tree while he was teaching her how to parallel-park. It has been like that with everything—Aunt Jocelyn folds whenever she gets agitated. To keep herself from getting agitated, she must take pills that Uncle Leonard used to mark off on an index card taped to the refrigerator. He used to do everything for her—drive her to mass every morning, schedule doctors' appointments, bring her to the grocery store, buy clothes for her, choose books from the library so she'd be content while he ran the hotel and gift shop.

Back when the starch queen was pregnant with Lenny, Aunt Jocelyn talked about wanting a baby too, but Uncle Leonard reminded her, “Not in your condition.” To appease her, he planted a rose garden on the semicircle of lawn in front of his hotel, prize-winning varieties of hybrid tea roses that he ordered from a catalogue —selecting them not for their colors but because their names attracted him: Command Performance, Sterling Silver, King's Ransom, Golden Gate, Apollo, Century Two, Royal Highness, Texas Centennial.